One Room Challenge Fall 2018-Week One

Hello friends!

Welcome to another round of the One Room Challenge! If you are new around here, the One Room Challenge is a bi-annual event hosted by Linda Weinstein of Calling it Home and Better Homes and Gardens. Over the next six weeks, myself and other featured designers across the internet will be transforming a room in six weeks and blogging about it every week so you can follow along! In addition to the featured designers (linked at the end of this post), there are over 200 guest participants that are working on rooms as well, so much inspiration!

It seems like such a short while ago I was starting my first ORC space as a guest participant a year ago, transforming an unused bedroom in our house into a cozy guest room/office. Then, this spring, I worked with friends to transform a spare bedroom in to a serene nursery to welcome their new son, Oliver into the world. I am so honored to have been selected as a featured designer for this year’s challenge, there are so many talented people this round and I hope you’ll click through at the bottom of the page and check out their projects as well!

As I am writing this, I’m thinking how even crazier things seem with the fact that I am going to be leaving that first ORC space I worked on in just a year ago because…..WE BOUGHT A HOUSE! It’s bittersweet, we love our house that we’ve been in for the past few years since moving to Philadelphia. Over the past three years I have had the opportunity to work on most every room in the house, even if it was just with paint. The house had been renovated previously, so making major transformations like redoing the kitchen never made sense for us. But we did what we could using paint, and wallpaper, updating lighting and building a faux fireplace, it has been so much fun. We have lot to look forward to in our new house though, and soo many chances to make it a reflection of our family and hopefully tie in to some fun parts of vestige HOME as a business, I’m so excited!

If you’re still reading my rambling thoughts you might be wondering, what room I’m going to be working on this round and as luck would have it, I am going to be working on our master bedroom in our new place. We thought that updating the master bedroom first could be beneficial (to our sanity) since most of the projects around the house are going to be long term, and we wanted to be able to have a finished space that we can relax in at the end of our often long workdays. Here’s a shot of the space as it currently stands (with some remnants of the previous owners furniture).

As you can see, this room is HUGE, at least by old house standards, and definitely for us as homeowners. We didn’t look for a house with a master this large, but I have to say that I have always dreamed of having a fireplace in my bedroom to fall asleep to, like, since I was a kid. Dreams do come true :)

The alcove to the left of the fireplace is providing me some inspiration, I’d like to create some kind of storage/display space because there really isn’t much with all the windows in the space.

The fireplace has the prettiest vintage tile surround, with soft pinks and a little blue with that perfect crackle that accompanies old ceramics. The gloss black paint on the mantle is a little strong for me, so look forward to something that will soften the look of this a bit.

Another thing that I’ve always been attracted to in old homes are windows…and this room has LOTS of them. Several singles, a row of three and a big bay window that looks out onto the front yard. Eventually we’ll be restoring each one of the original windows in the house (there are lots of panes of cracked glass), but until then, I’ve got some ideas of how to make them pop even more.

I’m envisioning a cozy seating area over by the bay window. I thought for a second about putting the bed closer to that area so the bed could be close to the fireplace, but the way that the room is laid out would block the view of most of the fireplace unless you were actually laying in the bed, not ideal. So a seating area it is!

The house is stone on the exterior and we have lots of deep sills to hold plant babies galore!

The other side of the room has the entrance to the room from the hallway, as well as a teeny closet that the previous owners used as shoe storage. There is a shallow walk in closet that runs almost the entire length of the back of the room (from the entrance to the corner). It’s the largest closet we’ve ever had in our lives and we feel totally spoiled.

That’s it for the initial tour of the space! I’ll be sharing more detailed design plans for the room next week so be sure to check back here on the blog. I’ll also be sharing lots of live progress on Instagram and Instagram stories throughout the next six weeks, so be sure to follow along there!

You can see what all the other featured designers are going to be getting into by following the links below. Thanks so much for all your kind words throughout this process, I’m excited your following along!!!

xo,

nicole